Readers: Why You Should Join Scribd

You may have seen the posts on Facebook (here and here) and Twitter (here and here) recently, about the fact that A Petition to Magic and Heritage of Deceit are now available on Scribd.

I think that this is a really wonderful idea! For those who don't know, you pay Scribd $8.99 per month (that's the cost at the time of this writing), and you can read as much as you want from their growing catalogue of books. And the catalogue certainly is growing. They claim to have over 100 000 books to read as part of their monthly subscription package, but there are probably a lot more: Smashwords announced a deal with Scribd last year, where they would begin distributing their over 250 000 books to Scribd (That's where A Petition to Magic and Heritage of Deceit come from).

Although the service costs $8.99 per month, you can get your first month's subscription for free. You have to enter your credit card details to sign up, but you can cancel at any time during the month. That means that if you're not prepared to pay their monthly subscription fee (which I think is very reasonable, by the way), you can still sign up, read A Petition to Magic and Heritage of Deceit, and many others, and cancel before the end of the month.

Scribd must be pretty confident that you're not going to do this; they stand to lose a lot of money if you do!

There's another site, called Oyster, that offers a similar service, but it's almost a dollar more expensive, at $9.95 per month. I'm not sure if their catalogue is bigger than Scribd's or not, but they're also only available in the United States. To the best of my knowledge, Scribd is available worldwide, which is a huge bonus if you're like most of the world who don't live in the US. (If you can confirm or deny Scribd's worldwide availability, please let me know in the comments section at the end of this post.)

Scribd is affordably priced, available worldwide, and has been described as the Netflix of books. Are you a subscriber? Why, or why not? Do you think this is a sustainable business model? Let's start a conversation! Pop your thoughts into the comment box below.